Tag Archives: 2016

Our colleague Dr Auke Pols will be presenting at the Fourth Annual OZSW conference (Dutch research school in Philosophy), 9-10 December 2016 on the topic ‘Balancing responsiveness and investor security in Responsible Innovation’.

Here’s an abstract of the talk:

In recent years, Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) has become a popular framework for developing and implementing new technology in the EU, as witnessed by its incorporation in Dutch and EU funding schemes. Building on process values such as anticipation, inclusiveness, responsiveness and reflexivity, RRI seeks to invite and incorporate stakeholder input from early on into the design process (Stilgoe et al. 2013). The hope is that this will lead to technical innovations that better fit societal and ethical values.

A general criticism of RRI is that it often ignores questions of power, politics and institutional settings (Van Oudheusden 2014). One significant political aspect of RRI that has received little attention so far is that RRI operates in a policy context where technical innovations are by and large developed by or in cooperation with the private sector. In this paper I argue that one fundamental problem of this arrangement is that the private sector prefers guaranteed returns on investment and thus stable and predictable policies supporting the innovation, or investor security. I show that this preference is in tension with RRI’s value of responsiveness and its stress on the importance of agility and flexibility when innovating. Basically, there is a trade-off here: increasing investor security diminishes motivation and opportunities to be responsive and vice versa. I explain how RRI could respond to this value conflict, using examples taken from the field of renewable energy technologies.

Renewable energy technologies illustrate this tension particularly well, as they often have difficulties competing with entrenched fossil fuel technologies and thus require significant and prolonged policy support and investor security to get off the ground. For example, the EU has an ambitious biofuel blending target for 2020 meant to create investor security and thus stimulate biofuel innovations for transport energy (Pols 2015). This target became controversial when it turned out that many biofuel projects created serious environmental and social problems. Nevertheless, in the face of diminishing social acceptance and ethical acceptability of biofuels, the EU changed its target only slightly. This was done to maintain investor security in the hope that this would stimulate further biofuel innovations that would solve the problems caused by earlier biofuel innovations (cf. Levidow et al. 2012). Thus, though this policy change exhibited some responsiveness towards the signalled problems, this responsiveness was made dependent on and limited by investor security. Hence the need to investigate the role investor security should play in RRI.

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Our team member Johanna Höffken has just published an article titled ‘Demystification and localization in the adoption of micro-hydro technology: Insights from India’ in Energy Research and Social Sciences journal.

Here’s the abstract:

The phrase ‘small is beautiful’ holds true for the micro-hydro plants discussed in this article. Micro-hydro plants can convert the energy of falling water into electricity. In India, access to electricity cannot be taken for granted, especially in rural areas, which do not yet have grid extension or where it is too costly or infeasible. In these cases, micro-hydro plants are a welcome solution. Here I discuss the efforts of two non-governmental organizations, a private company, and a government agency, to facilitate micro-hydro projects in India, thereby increasing the socio-economic empowerment of rural inhabitants without electricity access. Based on extensive ethnographic data and constructivist conceptualizations of scale and consequences I find that these projects can indeed be described as “beautiful” technology interventions. In line with the common discourse on “small is beautiful,” the projects emphasize community engagement, control, and locality. Yet, importantly, they are “beautiful” in diverse ways. The actors set different priorities when implementing their small-scale technology interventions. Highlighting these priorities is important because they can empower people to acquire different roles, ranging from engaged consumers to prosumers. Instead of solely concentrating on the (small) scale of a technology I plead to consider the significance of implementing these interventions.

Short Abstract

The development of smart and eco cities in both China and in India has gained high political attention and momentum on the national policy agendas. Following a comparative approach we explore the meaning of smart and eco by analyzing public discourses around eco and smart cities in China and India.

Long Abstract

The development of smart and eco cities in both China and in India has gained high political attention and momentum on the national policy agendas.

Since 2014, China is officially building an “Ecological Civilization” for which eco-cities are believed to be strong pillars. India has announced a “Smart Cities Mission” for similar reasons in May 2015 and has engaged 98 cities to compete in a smart city challenge. Winning cities will be supported in the implementation of their smart city plans.

The proposed paper explores the meanings of “smart” and “eco”, which are the key rhetoric lynchpins of these initiatives. In particular, the paper analyses the public discourses around eco and smart cities in China and India. It shows how manifold political, economical, and social aspects influence the shaping of the two concepts and what this might mean for the type and orientation of urban development in these two growing Asian nations.

The paper contributes empirical insights from recent and topical initiatives currently unfolding in China and India. It thus contributes new empirical/conceptual insights about smart-eco city dynamics to a growing body of STS literature on urban development in Asia.